Hi,
I don’t post this to be malicious or rude, but simply out of concern.
I believe this bot is killing community growth on Lemmy. I keep coming across would-be-interesting communities only to find a wall of bot posts with zero comments, zero votes, zero engagement. And I walk away disappointed instead of getting into a new community. As, I’m sure, may other users are doing.
Sure, you say, “just block the bot” if I don’t like it. But that doesn’t stop this thing from stifling any real engagement and growth in communities. Surely if someone can “just…”, you can “just” go back to reddit if you want to read reddit content that badly.
I admire the engineering you put into making this thing work. It’s impressive, and honestly very cool. But I really think it’s actively disengaging users, when Lemmy has enough of a hurdle to overcome in growing new communities.
Thats just my 2 cents. I’m not sure it will mean much, but I felt I had to share it. Again, no ill intent against what you’ve accomplished in creating this. Best wishes.
I entirely agree and I highly recommend that most instances generally ban bots like this.
But I’m not against people running them on instances where it is specifically welcomed, and I think other instances shouldn’t defederate the instances that do - we should just ban the bots and/or the remove the communities that consist entirely of bot posts.
This way, any users who want to use a lemmy client (or website) to read a combined view of the lemmyverse-at-large plus some scraped subset of reddit can just make an account on one of the servers that is doing that.
Human users of those instances should be able to participate in the larger lemmyverse, even if the bots are banned from the rest.
I don’t see it in the modlog now, but I think it was me that banned @bot@lemmit.online from lemmy.ml a few months ago, and I just banned a similar one @Dannebot@leddit.danmark.party today (and sent basically the above suggestion to the operator of it).
@criitz@reddthat.com @Halosheep@lemm.ee @Cagi@lemmy.ca @Hanabie@sh.itjust.works @SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml @WallsToTheBalls@lemmynsfw.com @cypherpunks@lemmy.ml @DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de: First of all: those are some wonderful usernames. Secondly: I have taken your concerns to heart and made some changes. See my update here: https://lemmy.ml/post/6190779.
Hey, it’s cool you took some people’s suggestions, but I guess you didn’t take mine… which was to allow signups on your instance so that people who want to see your reddit mirror and the rest of lemmy in a single interface can have a place to do so.
Right now they can only do that as long as some other instances don’t ban your bot. But this means those other instances need to carry that load (i see you now have over a million posts!), which is something they might decide to stop doing at any time.
If you let users signup on your instance, they could use it to follow stuff on other instances and see your bot posts.
Why not?
Ah, I guess I must have overlooked that part. There are several reasons for not wanting to allow signups.
One is quite simple, cost. Right now this is running on a small, single core instance. It often stutters (especially when handling video updates), and that is not an issue, since that just means it’s going to take small while before updates are sent out. But you wouldn’t want to have that delay for actual users. Right now the costs are quite manageable, if I have to scale up in order to provide a fluent experience for its users, not so much.
Most of the other reasons come down to the responsibility of having to provide a home to any outside users that sign up. I don’t have the interest or time to maintain a community of people, nor to guarantee the uptime that such a server would require. It also wouldn’t work. The largest Lemmy instance in existence, lemmy.world, has defederated from this instance. So any users that sign up here, would be devoid from content on there. And as you said, any other instance can decide to do so at any time (in fact, I very much suggest they do so in the FAQ).
I could go on, but I think you get my drift.
Completely agree. It’s just spam.
Edit to add: maybe I’m just unnecessarily grouchy but I wish we could move away from the idea that lemmy is a replacement reddit. There are similarities but lemmys own culture needs to coalesce independently. Crosspoint from reddit perpetuates the misconception in the worst possible way.
An extension of the above is the idea that defederation is the last, worst solution to any problem. It’s born of the idea that users should have one long- lived account that accesses everything which is in itself a redditism. Would it be so terrible if you needed multiple accounts to view instances which are not federated?
lemmit.online is fine, what a great project, archive some reddit posts or something… but federating with it doesn’t provide any value to anyone.
My block list is already as long as the LOTR trilogy, and its growth shows no signs of slowing down.
I can agree with this. I found it discouraging to see interesting posts only to find it was from the bot with no interaction.
I do not regret blocking the bot. It actually increased my enjoyment of lemmy.
I agree. The sheer number of bots and the … enthusiasm with their posting frequency is making the overall experience worse.
I remember a discussion I was having on another site about what was happening with Twitter and Reddit, and there was a phrase that really stuck with me - “curation is the product.” I think many of us use a service like lemmy to find interesting things, ask questions, and have conversations. The mass auto posting of article after article makes discovery challenging. My All feed looks like a spam-filled inbox.
And unfortunately block lists really don’t work. They’re tough to maintain, and they certainly don’t help new users find the communities that would make them stay.
I really think the bots need to be banned or throttled.
I agree wholeheartedly
